Merchant Link SecurityCents

By Beth McGarrity

Earlier this week, I was sitting in my cube when the building began to shake.  Now, I’ve rarely ever experienced an earthquake before, but I knew it wasn’t just a big semi-truck rolling through the neighborhood.  I grabbed onto my desk and held on tight until it stopped and then we evacuated the building.  Later reported as an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale, I realized I had every reason to feel shaken up by the experience.

Now, with the weekend approaching, our area is preparing for yet another incident.  Hurricane Irene is making its way up the east coast and most are preparing for both rains and winds up to 35 miles per hour.

Both of these incidents got me thinking about disaster preparedness — not only on a personal level, but also when it comes to our business and our customers’ businesses.

Given the nature of what we do, Merchant Link takes disaster preparedness very seriously to ensure our customers’ data remains secure and our service remains available and reliable. We have active data centers, each capable of handling 100 percent of all traffic, located in two different parts of the country.  Within each of these data centers, we test the infrastructure often and we ensure that there are multiple redundancies so that we never leave a single point of failure.

It’s not just about disasters.  It’s about business continuity and ensuring that regardless of the peaks in your business, the data can be protected and backed-up at all times.  Our retail merchants make sure they are prepared for holidays, our lodging customers prepare for the summer season, and our restaurant merchants make sure they are ready for special holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. But apart from holidays and hurricanes, testing should be conducted year-round.

For all of our customers and partners that are facing the storm this weekend, we hope you all stay safe and you can be comforted in knowing that we are doing everything we can to keep your data safe in the face of a potentially major natural disaster.